The invention relates to an arrangement for optically capturing a space from a plurality of directions.
It is desirable in many cases if, by means of technical devices, a clear determination of a position in space is enabled by evaluating camera images from a plurality of directions. In principle, this is possible with the aid of a stereoscopic camera arrangement. In this case, the overall recorded image consists of two partial images that are recorded from two lines of sight that are parallel or oblique to one another. Unlike human beings, who process stereoscopic images with two eyes, automated stereoscopic image processing requires a very large amount of computing power. Specifically, a lot of detail information is considered by the human being, often without him being aware of it. For example, such information includes the proportions, which are used for an initial, rough estimation of the spatial arrangement of certain objects even without stereoscopic image information. Translated to the automatic evaluation of stereoscopic images, this would mean that the object in question would first need to be identified in the image, and that typical dimensional information on a great number of objects of an extreme variety of types would need to be stored in a memory and then called up and evaluated, and the object in question would first have to be identified in the image.
Consequently, substantial computing power is required for automatic image analysis, particularly if the space does not have any defined characteristics that are stored in a computational model or electronic memory, but rather the position must be determined in any unknown space by means of automatic image analysis.
Moreover, an arrangement is known which has several sensors, such as positional and acceleration sensors, for example, as well as a camera, which records a single overall image that is not divided into partial images. The components of such an arrangement are often present in mobile electronic devices such as smartphones, tables and the like, so that, by means of a suitable program running on the device, an automatic, an image-based positional determination can be made. First, this arrangement is used to record an image of the entire space and calculate its own, first position in the space. Starting from this initial, optically detected position in space, further movements through the space are determined computationally with the aid of the sensors. Since the sensor information has slight errors or discrepancies that gradually accumulate, an increasing deviation of the sensorially calculated position from the actual position occurs over time, which is referred to as “drift.”
A generic arrangement for optically capturing a space from a plurality of directions is known from U.S. Pat. No. 3,055,265A that has first and second deflection elements for deflecting optical rays striking the first deflection elements from different directions. A camera is arranged downstream from the deflection elements, so that the camera can record panoramic images in such a way that no continuous panoramic image is stored, but rather a plurality of partial images are exposed on a film in a predetermined arrangement. The predetermined arrangement of the partial images on the film is different from the actual arrangement in which the corresponding parts of the image are arranged in the space.
A projection system is known from U.S. Pat. No. 3,144,806A that uses a standard projector to arrange several partial images that are projected simultaneously into a single larger, complete image, with an arrangement of optical deflection elements being disposed in front of the projector and hence downstream from the projector in the optical path. For this, it is required that the images be recorded using specially designed or converted in such a way that each image stored by the camera contains the corresponding partial images.